The site faces Daehyeon Elementary School to the south, with Hwimun High School and Samseong Station within walking distance to the north — yet it sits within an alley less than six meters wide. This condition favors educational facilities, quiet corporate offices, or tenants who value parking over street-front exposure. The open frontage created by the school is a clear asset, but it equally demands careful attention to visual privacy and noise.
The client sought a flexible, highly usable building that respected this context while responding to the site's diverse latent demand. From the outset, the project was approached as a remodel rather than a new build, with the explicit aim of minimizing construction cost, duration, and neighborhood impact.
See Architects identified three core challenges. First, maximizing leasable area: two floors were added vertically through an increase in floor area ratio, while existing floor footprints were left unchanged — avoiding costly fire suppression upgrades. The new upper floors were designed with ceiling heights exceeding four meters, and the existing piloti structure was retained to secure parking for up to eleven vehicles. The floor area ratio reached 230%.
Second, visibility. The existing building sat nearly three meters inside the site boundary, leaving it vulnerable to being obscured by future adjacent development. Rather than addressing this through surface treatment, See Architects extended a concrete frame — emphasizing both vertical and horizontal elements — to the site boundary itself. The space between the frame and the building became a new intermediate zone between architecture and city, while serving as a visual and psychological buffer from the school to the south.
Thirdly, efficiency. By minimizing the demolition of primary structural members, both construction cost and schedule were reduced to less than half of a full rebuild. Remodeling was not a fallback — it was the strategy. Exposed concrete clads the frame elements; gray brick tile covers the existing building faces — a material separation that makes the structural logic legible and distinguishes the building from the red-brick residential fabric of the surrounding alley.
In the initial design, the frame was a freestanding vertical wall set two meters clear of the facade. During permitting, the regulatory authority raised concerns about potential unauthorized enclosure of the intervening space. See Architects took this constraint as a turning point: the frame was revised to begin as part of the facade at lower levels and step progressively forward with each floor. What had been a purely vertical element became something closer to a three-dimensional urban sculpture — read as a rhythmic grid from the front, with more volumetric presence from various angles.
